General Discussions
General Discussions
The demise of the Game Tester
The recent kerfuffle with Ghostface has brought up a lot of emotions, suggestions and vitriol. The last few killers have been met with similar push back. The Spirit was lamented until the community banded together and got her "fixed".
The question is, why does this keep happening? The simple answer is video game companies no longer have extensive teams of game testers like in the old days. They found out they can ̶s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ persuade their player base to pony up cash for the honor of beta testing the game for them.
It's a smart move in the early days of a game. A giant swarm of gamers will break a game faster than internal testing can. Great! Stress testing is amazing when trying to work out early bugs. However, the more a game gets solidified, the more a player base can become split, especially in a game such as this.
There was a time where, let's call them "professional gamers", were hired to find bugs and give feedback. This was in a controlled environment and the players were encouraged to give constructive feedback because they were on the payroll. When you decide to let the whole of the internet test your stuff in an open forum, you have to wade through so much BS and misplaced anger that it's hard to not get frustrated and you just start to tune out even the good ideas. (Right @Peanits and @not_Queen?)
So how do you fix this for a game like DBD? Sure a lot of companies still have internal testing, but it's usually by the people MAKING the game so they are too close to it, too proud of it, or whatever. You need a small group of people who love video games as well as making them better. Just because the job position is gone, doesn't mean the mindset has as well.
There needs to be an "Alpha" team before these updates even reach the PTB. That team already exists. It's all the streamers who love the game enough to keep churning out content about it. Hire a dozen of these guys (Monto, Noob3, Space Coconut, Hybrid Panda, etc) and let them play whatever is going to be put out on the PTB before anyone else. Get their feedback because most likely they will spot problems and give you legit feedback and fixes before it becomes a giant problem later when a cacophony of irate gamers attack your product publicly.
This will also prevent good ideas from being ignored because they are not coming "internally". Most companies can't or won't take outside ideas for legal reasons but if those players are under contract, those good ideas don't go to waste.
This has been sitting in my head for a while. I have friends who used to be Game Testers and that job is all but gone now. It sucks but I say it's time to re-visit it, even on a small scale.
TL;DR - Games like this need a first line of defense before it reaches PTB to spot problems before they begin. Hire some streamers to polish your game before it becomes a cluster%^&$ later.
Comments
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You don't need testers to find things as obviously broken as the PTB, or most of the other issues
The devs just clearly don't care about quality and want to rush content as fast as possible to make more money
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It's more likely that the 6 week release cycle would be and/or is more of a problem than anything else as far as QA is concerned. They are releasing a lot of content in a relatively small amount of time. They basically get 4 weeks to finish up whatever is going out for the next mid-chapter or chapter; then 2 weeks to fix it after it goes out on PTB.
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The inhouse testers are too biased/afraid/garbage at the game to properly state their opinions in regards to what the killer needs in order to be effective.
We've seen QA people playing on livestreams and they're basically running in straight lines, not looking behind themselves and running full meta perk loadout.
Why even hire professional gamers or good streamers to do work when you can have a PTB available for everyone and then not bother using the feedback they get to improve their game?
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Either that, or they didn't bother actually considering to check this before the PTB and expected others to find the problems for them (Which essentially is what the PTB is, its just a early access to content for players to take part in with the hopes that they find problems for them to fix) the idea of a PTB is smart, and its cheap for them to do rather than have their own team test it internally.
The problem is though, you can't release something to be tested in such a poor state and expect nobody to be angry about it. They should of had the foresight to check this before even considering to put it in the PTB. It doesn't matter if the PTB was originally to find bugs, or change balance, you don't just release something so broken and expect the same results...
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I disagree with one notion:
Do NOT hire the streamers. I'm sorry, but we've seen bias in all of these people, and at the end of the day, you CANNOT guarantee that they won't be suggesting things they will make their streaming experience better for them in the long run.
You need to hire people that have no stake in any claim, and people that have BACKGROUND in testing video games and/or people that understand the internal mechanisms and nuances that go into game design. It takes more than just playing games.
You need to study games as a science, because it is. Not just in video games, but designing and testing a games of any kind in general requires knowledge of various aspects. I argue that streamers do not inherently have this understanding simply by playing the game a lot.
This is a job that requires, as you said, professionalism. Streamers are not professionals at testing games.
Not to mention testing is a VERY rigorous and tedious process that involves repeating the same things thousands of times. I don't think any streamer is going to give up easy cash for just relaxing over wanting to tediously repeat the same motions, except this time with no donations.
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I personally just think there's something fundamentally wrong with the concept of the PTB when they get overwhelming feedback day 1, then their reply is "we want to change X, Y and Z, but that won't happen before the release."
If the first realistic testing is happening in such a small window, and that doesn't leave enough time to attempt, let alone test changes with the content, then the whole testing phase is either redundant and should be skipped over, or should be timed better to allow for changes to be made.
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I agree and disagree. Streamers would be very good at breaking the game which is extremely useful in the testing progress. A really good killer vs really good survivors would be a good test-bed for finding balance issues. The problem with bias would be if the streamers were allowed to dictate the changes.
Extra shower thought: What would the game look like if their testing was mainly Mcote vs Not_Queen + Noob3 + Monto + Tydetyme?
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Another couple voices in the wind who shares a similar view:
Post edited by smappdooda on0
